Media Center 11 Comments:After a heavy workout, MC began to falter on me. As I banged into things that interrupted my workflow, I jotted them down in this file. Overall, MC performed very well indeed and I’ve managed to get through a fair old chunk of my backlog, what follows is a little feedback containing some wishes and some repeatable bugs. Take from it what you will, I wrote the stuff, so even though it’s got bit chunky, I may as well post it.
Here we go then:Favourites should switch media mode if it’s required, and the favourites list should auto-update if a location is moved or deleted. The tree can get well spread out, and while there is always ctrl + g, a well organised favourites list is a great way of getting around and the above items would help enormously with the “well organised” bit.
Talking of the tree, I also think that the Library Browser should be pinned as the first item below Media Library. This way it would not get lost as more branches of the tree are expanded. It’s been added to my favourites list because I keep losing it! I *think* that what I'm proposing would mean that navigational favourites would need to move out of the registry and into the database somewhere. That sounds massive. If it can be done, that would be amazing, if it can't, fair enough, you gotta admit though, it would be neat
The MC image editor is very basic, but is actually quite handy, or it would be but for a couple of bad traits…
I’m using it like so: having gotten a fair few of my images (originals safely backed up) organised in MC, while browsing the image albums I come across one that could use some red-eye work or a bit of cropping perhaps, and the editor is but a click away. Great. Upon saving the edits though, all tags are deleted and MC adjusts the date to match the [date (modified)], which in turn breaks the album and any ‘timeline’ viewschemes. Is there anyway to update a files’ thumbnail? If I use an external editor, then return to MC, the AW preview shows the edited file but the thumbnail does not update to reflect the edit.
There is something weird going on with panes / filelists and persistently selected files.
In a view scheme with several panes, leave the right most on “all” and click through some selections to the left, and finally select something in the list. Now click on “all” in the right-most pane. Nothing happens. So click elsewhere in the pane, then click on “all” again and the panes finally refresh, but the selection still remains in the filelist. Selecting a bunch of files in the list and deleting them removes them from the list, but does not remove the selection “block”. Ie. If 10 files were selected and deleted, the list moves up and now the next 10 files in the list are selected.
When setting the image playback options, can we use database expressions in the caption field? Another place I’d like to use them is in the thumbnail text area of the customise current view dialogue. Images can contain all manner of tags, if the people tag is populated, I might like to use that, but use something else if it is not.
Customise current view has an apply button. I’d really, really, like to see one of those added to the edit viewscheme dialogue too.
Whenever I’ve tried cd or DVD burning with MC I’ve run into problems so I use something else . Last night, I successfully burned a data DVD of .ape backup files using MC, which was nice. The only aftercare needed was the volume name in the cd database had to be updated manually. I may do some more MC burning. I wonder if it handles cd text writing any better these days? Only one way to find out I guess.
When typing in, say, the info area of the playlist header, and the track changes, the cursor will bounce back, not just to “home” but the very start of the field being edited, if you miss this when it happens, the result is some very odd looking descriptions that are not discovered till later on. V. annoying.
For the past couple of days MC has been getting a workout as I catch up on some of those jobs that are always going to get done ‘tomorrow’.
I have 169 audio files selected and want to rename them from properties, there is no music playing at this time, (can’t interrupt Coronation Street
) and MC throws me this warning…
I don’t understand it as the only field that should change is the filename, and what, I wonder, are the other files?
I have set up keywords for some of the more lengthy library fields. fnp becomes [filename (path)] and fnn becomes [filename (name)]. MC would appear to be having problems as this:
becomes this:
~mix is also playing up:
This is fine:
But this is not:
It becomes:
I think it’s only a cosmetic issue as the searches seem to return the correct results. Still a little disconcerting nonetheless.
As more weirdness sets in, I decide to close MC before something nasty or irretrievable happens, and after much HDD grinding, I’m presented with this:
I re-opened MC and retried moving the 169 files and this time all went as expected. That’s this post wrapped up now, If you’re still reading, I salute and thank you.
Goodnight,
-marko.
edited by admin - 28/06/05